Laura was born in LA and her family moved to Scotts Valley when she was nine years old. This is her story about growing up in a suburban California town. Now working as a writer in New York City, she says that in a way, the bullying encouraged her to work harder
Description: It's a very, very small town, five minutes from Santa Cruz. I moved there when I was nine. Before that, I lived in LA which I liked because there was more diversity. With Scotts Valley the school was 98 percent white. I remember being really surprised, moving to a town with so many white people. I was also really surprised that there was no graffiti like there was in LA. I had my parents drive around the town twice to confirm it. It was a nice place to live at first and it was safer, but the kids were a lot meaner there.
Negative: I really started getting bullied a lot in seventh grade. Sometimes, I liked to indulge in being the victim, but it got to the point where it was beyond my control. It wasn't just one group of people who targeted it me: it was people from all different cliques. There were the stereotypical popular kids, the punk kids and the jocks who weren't that smart (but very malicious).
I had a famous duel with the most popular girl in the grade. She would write swear words on the wall, with my name below, but spelled wrong. I caught her once. She was writing it all over the white boards and walls in school. She also had a boyfriend who would make fun of me. One day he opened a stapler and started flinging staples at me in science class. Then he pretended to accidentally trip into me from behind and put a "kick me" sign on my back. I didn't realize it until I went up to the board and everyone started laughing at me. It was like a scene from a movie.
In eighth grade the girl stopped bothering me. It was after we had both joined cheerleading and we were told by the principal that we couldn't communicate at all with each other. But by that point, she had damaged my reputation so much, the entire school knew I was this bullied kid. While she stopped, her friends didn't.
In cheerleading we had to perform at the school dances. In the middle of the dance, everyone would go to the bleachers and watch us perform. My parents were chaperoning one dance and when we performed, some of the girls started cheering for me, but it was insincere. There were mean comments mixed in with the cheers. After the performance was over, my mother asked me why they were yelling at me and I was ashamed. My parents knew that I was being bullied, but it was the first time they saw it.
I just kind of took it because I thought I was guilty, that if the bullies were saying things, they must be true. I blamed myself.
At one point, we had a unit on school shootings: how to prevent them, what the signs were. One of the boys that was mean to me came up to me and asked if I thought about bringing a gun to school because I got picked on all the time. I was angry: there's nothing in me that's violent. I don't have it in me to do something that terrible and it really hurt my feelings to have such things said about me.
He knew how badly I was being bullied, to the point where he thought I could do something like that, yet he and his friends continued to make fun of me. They assumed that people who were bullied would do it. They knew that what they were doing to me could drive someone to do it and they continued to be mean.
In a way, the bullying was more traumatic than the death of my father, who passed away while I was in high school. I was OK with his death because he raised me really well and I didn't feel shortchanged on family life. The bullying, however, kept going on and on.
Positive: The best part of Scotts Valley were meeting my best friends Crystal, Lauren and Nikita. It was the first day of fourth grade and I was assigned the seat next to Crystal. We became best friends that day, after we found out both of our birthdays were in July. When you're a little kid, something like that means you have to be best friends. We still are.
She introduced me to Lauren and Nakita, and we became a group of four. We had so many asinine inside jokes. We'd have sleepover and create mischief: throw bottles of nail polish in the street, glue dollar bills to the road.
The last time we all hung out, we had dinner. We were still ridiculous together, still telling jokes. It just goes to show we're never really going to lose that side of ourselves. It's a positive tie to our childhoods. Their childhoods weren't perfect either, but we had each other.
I think I came out luckier than I thought I did. Some people don't have friends that they've known for that long. I went through two years of hell in middle school, but I had people to make it better.
Bottom line: It was a classic, small town experience.
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